Abstract
This article presents the findings of a study of the coverage of health, science and technology during 2012 by the Jornal Nacional, a national television news program in Brazil produced by the Rede Globo de Televisão. A total of 246 news stories addressing health-related topics were analyzed, half of which addressed scientific research, technological innovation and hospital care, and were shown to represent a doctor-centered discourse. The findings also show that 82% of the news stories concerning science and technology advertise products that are about to be introduced onto the market, illustrating the commercial nature of this research. The article discusses two aspects portrayed by these news stories that characterize the biological body as an artifact: the construction of a virtual and fragmented body through the diffusion of images of the inside of the body; and the importance of biotechnological issues, which leaves life processes open to molecular manipulation and alteration. The study also questions the nature-culture hybridization present in biotechnological objects.
Highlights
The impacts of the advances in biomedical sciences and of the centrality of media space on everyday life has marked political, ethical, and epistemological implications for the healthcare field in the twenty-first century
In a social context in which everyday life has become increasingly “mediatized” and social identities and integration are produced through consumption, the media has become a critical space in the process of subjectivation and in the production of ways of thinking and behavior
Problematizing the enunciation of risks, forms of reductionism, discredit and beliefs portrayed through media channels, Vasconcellos-Silva et al.[3] suggest that: unlike Frankfurtian primordial logic, processes involving the production of meaning are interlinked at various levels through which the ideas and representations that sustain communication and group identity circulate; the cultural-historical level of the imaginary as the cumulative production of ideas that circulate as references that are always susceptible to resignification
Summary
The impacts of the advances in biomedical sciences and of the centrality of media space on everyday life has marked political, ethical, and epistemological implications for the healthcare field in the twenty-first century. The incorporation of scientific and technological knowledge into everyday life conditions the production of hybrid beings (agricultural goods, animal cultures, synanthropic organisms, insects, viruses, bacteria, vaccines, etc..) that are apparently natural, but whose existence is coemergent with or produced by human activity. In this way, modernity itself jeopardizes nature in the context of contemporary society[17]. Apart from being the most common theme, hospitals was the secondary topic in 13 stories concerning research and technological advances and in 13 stories about market regulation, healthcare plans, and consumer protection
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